An Early Fourteenth-Century Philosopher on Whether Something Can Come to Be Out of Nothing?

Antoine Côté (University of Ottawa)

The Italian Averroist, Maino de Maineri (ca. 1290- ca. 1368), is the author, among other works, of an intriguing disputed question entitled “Whether something can come from nothing” (“utrum ex nihilo possit aliquid fieri.”) The quaestio is chiefly concerned with the problem of natural substantial change; specifically: do the substances that are produced in nature come from something pre-existent or not? Maino wants to defend what he views as Aristotle’s moderate solution to this question—according to which substances are produced by the efficient causality of natural, external agents that educe them from the pure potency of matter—against two “extreme” alternatives: the “hiddenness of forms” theory (latitatio formarum) of Anaxagoras, following whom new forms are merely the manifestation of pre-existent forms in matter—and hence not new at all—and the “creationist” view of the “three Laws.” Maino provides a competent defense of Aristotle’s theory, adducing a wide variety of texts by Aristotle and Averroes. However, the principal interest of the quaestio lies elsewhere. It is to be found in the lengthy discussion Maino devotes to the views of an unnamed near-contemporary of his who advocated a position which he describes as “very similar” to that of Anaxagoras. This near-contemporary author was identified by Charles Ermatinger in 1969 as the Augustinian Friar James of Viterbo, who was active in Paris in the 1290s, and who defended an original version of the doctrine of seminal reasons. Maino argues that Viterbo’s theory is just as wrong-headed as that of Anaxagoras. As we will see, the numerous arguments he advances in support of this claim attest to considerable philosophical acumen.

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